Discussions of Sri Lanka's political futures – in international media, policy thinktanks and human rights groups – have been for some time now been cast in simple terms. They present an uncompromising, militaristic "Sinhala-dominated regime" and a "marginalised Tamil minority", once authoritatively represented by Tiger rebels, now routed militarily. Given this framework, "a political solution" with "autonomous self-rule" for the Tamils is urged.

Framing non-European societies as collections of prescriptive communities has been for several centuries now been a persuasive and authoritative way of knowing that certainly has some truth value. But as Edward Said has shown, such an Orientalist orientation can also freeze our understandings into a dichotomy of "west" versus an ethnicised "rest", which is more about the authority of the knower, than the life worlds of the known. Those concerned with radical democracy and social justice would do well to think beyond such a framing.

First, the island polity, complexly conflictual through the many centuries of its known history, could not be, until a century or so ago, rendered intelligible through a Sinhala v Tamil binary. These ways of being solidify through the British colonial project of enumerating populations and configuring political representation through primordial prescription. In the postcolonial period, the reserved "communal" representations of a colonial state council are what bourgeois, nationalist "Sinhala", "Tamil" and "Muslim" political parties continue to battle each other for, in the name of their "communities".

The tradition of the Sri Lankan left, especially when it was rooted in a militant working class, was organised along different lines – those of socio-economic inequality that cut across prescriptive community. While the parliamentary left drifted towards a Sinhalised social democracy in the 1970s, many strands of independent leftist thought and activism continued, until the early 1980s, to argue and work for alliances that cut across the "communities" of the nationalists. It was at this moment that significant left groups, some parliamentary, some extra-parliamentary, which had watched the back of urban trade unions broken by the rightwing Jayewardene regime, began to see the incipient movement of Tamil nationalist radicals as progressive and able to mount a challenge to the state.

In left parlance then, what was hitherto seen as the colonial legacy of bourgeois Tamil nationalism was recast as the national question; Tamil self-determination became a popular cause for progressives. In this framework, which made sense in the days before the collapse of the USSR, the resolution of the national question – the project of Tamil self-determination – was never an end in itself; it was a necessary turning point on the way to capturing state power. This is the root of the alliance between a variety of radical, democratic, socialist and feminist groups on one hand, and Tamil nationalists of conservative, liberal, violent and non-violent hues on the other. For the latter, of course, unlike the left, self-determination, self-rule, or separation was an end in itself.

Tamil nationalism did challenge the state, and very successfully, but it grew brutal and xenophobic, never making common cause with the dispossessed in other communities. Like any other nationalism, Tamil nationalism seeks to erase diversity within its putative bounds, violently masking social inequality; the call for self-determination for Tamils qua Tamils remains within those bounds. It is time that radical, democratic or liberal intellectuals and activists, both in the island and outside, struggle for the rights of Sri Lankans as citizens, disassociating themselves from Tamil nationalism, as they must also from violent, racist Sinhala nationalism.